Things To Do Alone: Stop Being Alone

Posted by on March 19, 2015 No comments

http://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/relationships/no-date-no-problem-10-things-to-do-alone/ss-AA8HJ6s

In the “articles that didn’t need to be written” category, as well as the “articles that make no sense” category, I came across this one.  There have been lots of articles written about introverts lately, trying to educate others as to how introverts behave and why they behave that way.  So I assumed that this article was written with the same consideration.  Nope.

Here’s a summary of the suggestions for things to do alone:

  1. Go to a bar
  2. Go to a wedding
  3. Go to a concert
  4. Do a DIY project at home
  5. Go to a restaurant or café
  6. Go to local stores
  7. Go on a vacation
  8. Go to school
  9. Go to the movies

First off, the fact that masturbation didn’t make the list is a major oversight and destroys the author’s credibility.  That would be the #1 thing to do while alone.

Jokes aside, the author doesn’t seem to know what the word “alone” means.  All but one suggestion involves going out to where people are, many times with the intention of meeting new people.  That’s not being alone.  The article title should be “10 things to do alone when you don’t want to be alone”.

This article was an easy target, but there are becoming more and more easy targets every day.  Another alarming trend I am seeing is grammatical errors in news stories.  Things like missing words or misspelled words (probably via autocorrect).  In print media, there used to be a position called “editor”, whose role it was to read and correct all stories before publishing.  The editor would do normal proofreading, but would also manage the style and tone of the story.  When you understand how involved this could be, you gain a greater respect for the editor role.

But in the modern world of self-publishing, immediate deadline, 24-hour news, the editor role seems to be obsolete.  Editors would be more suited for weekly magazines like Time or Newsweek where the articles would be a more in-depth retrospective of events.  It’s kind of sad to me.

So what’s my excuse when I have a spelling mistake or a grammatical error?  Well, I don’t have an editor.  I do a re-read of my posts usually, sometimes a couple of times.  But we know how easy the brain can skip over double words or can mysteriously fill in missing words when you know what’s coming next.

Time and Money and Pots and Trees

Posted by on March 18, 2015 No comments

So the last few months have been spent in what I’ve been calling “austerity.”  The trick is, you give something a somewhat clever name and you will get more enticed to see it succeed.

But the end result has been positive.  Prior to starting this exercise, I was blowing my budget on my credit card spending.  Usually, that’s not bad because the budget isn’t the full amount I have available.  Then I started blowing through that buffer and had to start drawing from savings.  That wasn’t as bad as it could be because I had some silent transfers into the savings account.  But it was bad.  My savings account balance was about cut in half and I began to get worried.

However, at the same time, I paid off the car loan and did a refinance on my second mortgage, so that was two monthly payments that immediately went into savings.  Then I went hard-core and eliminated all extra spending except for food and gas.  That has been very productive.  I’ve been slowly draining my savings account for probably a couple of years now, and even with the replenishment I’ve been doing lately, it’s still at only 50% of its peak value.

Right now, I can see the future balance forecasts and they look great.  I look at the amounts being deposited and I think, “I could be buying (this gadget) every paycheck with that money.”  And somehow, that really puts things in a sad perspective.  Every paycheck, I could be buying some neat new toy.  One thing, for all that money.  That makes it seem like I’m not saving that much at all.  Then you all all those together and it’s like, “that’s really not a lot of money at all.”

Wait a minute.  I had a spending problem where I persuaded myself that I wasn’t spending a lot of money, now I have a savings problem where I feel like I’m not saving a lot of money.  What a mental mess this is.  So let’s look at it from another perspective.

They say you should have 6 (used to be 1, then 3, now 6) months worth of income saved for emergencies.  So right now, I’m at almost 3 months. To get to 6 months savings, it’s going to take maybe another 4-5 months of my current effort.  What’s that say?  I’m saving 33% of my pay by “hiding money” and another 14% in voluntary savings.  My fixed expenses are about 25% of my net pay a month.  Almost half my pay is being saved.  I shouldn’t feel bad about that at all.

So why do I feel bad?  Is it the watched pot never boiling?  Is it a case where I can’t see the forest for the trees?  Is it a psychosis like washing your hands over and over and never believing they’re clean?  That’s what I’m worried about.  I have to keep reminding myself things are good and I’m on track.  But does that mean I can give myself permission to spend?  And then what?  Will I fall back into my over-spending habits?  I have a big list of things I want.  I don’t need any of them.

We’ll revisit this in a couple of months.

Thanks For Your Opinion

Posted by on March 18, 2015 No comments

I’ve been saying 2015 is going to be a great year.  It’s a year I’m going to focus on me and not get involved with outside projects like helping other people or starting businesses, or committing to volunteer to a group.  Doesn’t that sound selfish?

Well, I believe everyone needs to have a period of time to reflect and recharge.  Putting out energy and effort all the time is very difficult and draining, especially for an introvert. (And what’s up with all the recent articles on introverts, anyway?)

While I spend this time building myself back up, I also want to take the time and look at myself and others and decide what needs changing.  One of the things that I’ve really gotten irritated with is people’s tendency to state opinion as fact.  And if they’re not stating it as fact, then they’re stating it as an absolute.  If it’s not an absolute, then it’s being stated as a benchmark.  You get what I’m saying.  “This product will make your life easier.”  If not that, then, “This product is the best.”  And if not that that, then, “If you’re not using this product, then you’re not getting any benefit.”

Sounds like Marketing 101, right?  So why try to fight that?  I’m sure I do it on occasion, too.  But that’s something I want to change.  The tone of people when they make statements like that is exclusionary.  What they are saying, to a degree, is, “I use this (or do this, or have this, or even want this), and if you don’t as well, you are inferior.”  Notice that it can actually be used against people when you aren’t even in the group, just that you want to be in the group is enough.

What’s the alternative?  First, understand that your choice is always a personal opinion.  Guard your statement like, “In my opinion, this product is the best.” or “For my needs, this product works best.”  You are allowing the other person to disagree without either of you losing face. Now if the other person responds with a personal attack like, “that’s because you’re stupid,” well, what can you do?  You know what you’re dealing with.

Next, realize that there are many ways of accomplishing the same result. A product or service or lifestyle or anything else is made up of a bunch of smaller parts.  A person’s choice may still satisfy the individual needs even if the whole product is different.  In summary, this is the “that’s not important to me” factor that no one ever considers when making broad opinion-based statements.  Of course, counter-arguments can devolve into “If that’s not important to you, then you don’t know anything about this.”

Understanding and remembering these points is what I want to work on this year.  I don’t want to be that person, that fanboy, that pretentious jerk, that know-it-all.  I want to be inclusive, not exclusive.  Accept people’s choice and don’t insult them for it.  Recognize that your choice may be better-suited (not better) and if so, promote the details that make it better-suited (not better) for that person.  Understand that you don’t know what is unimportant to others and don’t insist they make it important.

A good example I’ve mentioned before is the motorcycling community.  Some people are like “If you don’t ride a Harley, you’re nothing” and others are like, “As long as you’re on two wheels (or three in some cases), you’re cool.”  Exclusive vs. inclusive.  And at the end of the day, we’re all just people.

Bagtastic

Posted by on March 18, 2015 No comments

The Internet is great for shopping, except in two specific cases, when you want to touch something and when there’s too many choices for an item.

Recently, I was in Target and in the checkout line, I saw they had reusable shopping bags.  They had the typical fake-cloth bags, and they had a canvas bag as well.  I picked up one of those canvas ones and the cashier was like, “No, those are $5. the 99 cent ones are the red ones.”  And I was thinking to myself, “but I like this one…” And I ended up buying it.

It’s a really nice bag.  It’s soft and roomy and it has a hook loop for hanging it up and it has eyelets that I just realized would be used to hold it upright in a bagging rack.  It’s a good design.

So I thought I would try to find some others like it to replace my cheaper, branded grocery store bags.  And this one is branded, too, so it’d have to be a Target-only bag.  I’m a little weird about using other people’s bags in a store.

Well, thank you Internet for giving me so many choices.  Add to that the deceptive descriptions.  Search for “cotton” and you get cotton-poly.  Search for “canvas” and get plastic canvas.  Search for “tote” and get purses.  Search for “shopping bag” and get a ton of marketing and printing company ads.

And on top of all that, I have no idea what the quality is like.  You can’t feel the fabric, you can’t see the stitching, you can’t make any quality judgment from a picture.  This is just one of those cases where you need to buy it in person.  But of course whatever store you are in is going to sell their bag with their brand on it.

So I did something quaint and old-fashioned.  No, I didn’t go to a physical store.  I searched for a company that specialized in cloth bags instead of just relying on good old Amazon.  I found a company that manufacturers cloth shopping bags and their prices are completely reasonable. 

Now, I have the dilemma of choosing to spend money when I am still in austerity mode.  Like I keep reminding myself – it’s something I want, not something I need.  And that’s something that takes real effort.  “Oh, it’s only $25.”  And I’ve used that rationalization about things for much more and much less.

Revamp

Posted by on March 12, 2015 No comments

In the continuing theme of rebuild and reinvent this year, I took the sledgehammer to my website.  It’s something that has been needing torn down for many years.  The idea of a website going without an update for… 10 years (?!) is unheard of.  Unless the site is truly dead.

But I’m not dead yet.  And I decided to redo the website in a much simplified version.  Gone is the whole “About Us” page, making me seem like some big firm of developers.  Gone are the Software and Support sections that really only had a couple of items in them.  Who was I trying to impress?

Back when I started, there was this pressure to always seem like a consummate professional and always like a huge organization, because no one would take you seriously otherwise.  As time and experience went on, I realized, I didn’t need any of that validation.

Now I’m down to two whole pages, but I have links to other whole websites I’m doing, so that makes my site more what it should be: a portal to my other work.

And part of that website is another blog, so maybe that will get revived as well.  Let’s see last post was…October 2012.  Sigh.

Get To The Point

Posted by on March 4, 2015 No comments

It’s somewhat shocking to me to see the way I’ve changed as I’ve aged.  One thing that recently struck me is the way I write.  I wandered onto another person’s blog and this person fancied himself a writer.  Every sentence had a level of pomposity that even the word pomposity doesn’t even express.  By that, I mean his writing was excessively flowery.  I thought, geez, I used to write like that.

I have no idea why I used to do it or why I stopped.  I must assume, like with many things as I got older, the question became, “Who am I trying to impress, here?”  The answer most every time was, it doesn’t matter.

But, I could still write like that if I wanted to.  But when I read stuff like that after writing, it sounds overdone.  If you can’t get the point across in normal language, advanced vocabulary isn’t going to help you.  Maybe it’s because I now write much more factual content and less fiction.  Fiction is a place where descriptive, verbose, and picturesque language should be used – to transport the reader.  When you are writing instructions, you don’t want to transport the reader anywhere. You want to get shit done.

Ah, romance.  That fleeting, etheric sensation that compels a man to remove himself from his left-brained, analytical prison and dash madly to the fountain of life.  To drink deeply of the youth and vigor that had previously been tucked away in the recesses of his being, like a book scorned and discarded as too childish and fantastical for the adult he wished to be.  Unhand that child, villain!

That’s how it reads to me.  A bunch of independent words that each strike an emotional note and end up as a cacophonic disaster.  Sure, some people do it better than others, and some even do it worse than that contrived mish-mash I spit up.

And the reason I wrote this is because I found an old archive disk with documents – old documents – on it and I’m deathly afraid to open them.  On the other hand, maybe writing a story parodying that style would be good for me.  The whole, “so bad, it’s good” could be something I excel at.  I mean, what the hell, Fifty Shades of Grey exists, right?

Write On

Posted by on March 3, 2015 No comments

This is so weird.  I was reading a forum this day about site that did essay writings.  The forum was complained that essay sites were scams and had unprofessional writers with lesser grammar and no knowledge of true English writing capabilities.  I read so much of it that I believe in my heart that it has permanently afflicted my writing ability and compositional style.

Whew.  It’s pretty damn hard to write incorrectly.  But seriously, after reading so many posts by a site owner defending his business in broken English, after having to mentally extract the meaning from the words, it got to me.  I mean, you could understand the meaning, but the words were just wrong.  Even now, I feel a little tainted.  Or at least, I feel suspicious of what I’m writing.

I feel like I need to write more to get my normal thoughts flowing again instead of thinking in “foreign English”.  So, this whole experience made me realize just how identifiable native English is.  Even more so, how identifiable your personal writing style is.  I’m shocked to think that someone would actually turn to a writing service to create an essay or report for school work.  Do people really think they’re fooling anyone?

Maybe I’m just a lucky person who likes writing, but I’m not really an academic.  In high school, I had a term paper that was due before Christmas break.  I turned it in on the second-to-last day of school.  I almost failed.  Seeing the poor quality of work being created by these writing services, for a brief moment, I thought, maybe I should sign up to freelance for one.  Nah…  If the topic doesn’t interest me, I’d never get anywhere with it.  Plus, I don’t actually have the proper knowledge of the structure of an academic paper.

I have also heard of – and briefly considered joining – the freelance writing services for reviews/articles/blog posts/etc for the Internet.  It doesn’t pay all that well, and it seems like you’re constantly producing vapid content, but it could be a small income.  As long as you know how to repeat keywords, I guess.  I’ve been getting better at spotting canned reviews and comments lately, so that industry is in need of improvement, too.

And that would possibly be my downfall.  I would care too much.  I would have to make every fake review or comment unique and look as authentic as possible, which would then just take too much time and cost me money.  Sadly, it’s about volume.  I’ve seen it over and over in many different professions.  Even when I tried freelance remote computer assistance, the people that succeeded were the ones who could identify quick calls, multi-task multiple calls at once, and keep the churn going.  Meanwhile, I accepted a job from “an elder” who insisted on telephone support instead of chat, and then spent an hour showing him how to do email.  I didn’t make hardly anything from that call, but I’m sure I had a stronger impact.  I quit shortly after.

The More You Know

Posted by on March 3, 2015 No comments

I guess I’ve been on a Tumblr-hating kick lately.  Actually, I guess it’s more of a social media hate-fest.  But mostly, it’s just seeing how fucked up Tumblr users are.  I was searching for articles to support my position and was surprised that it wasn’t the articles, but the comments on those articles that proved my point.

In a Forbes article (Forbes!), the author was writing about a Tumblr post that had millions of reblogs/likes (“notes” in the Tumblr world) and how cool it was.  One reader wasn’t happy that her special world had been exposed:

Dearest Jason; let alone Forbes.
If you had a heart, and knew how tumblr worked, tumblr is one big family, and if you are someone who knew how tumblr worked, before it was mainstream, you’d understand: The people of tumblr are lazy f*cks who don’t change posts because the are ignorant a-holes like you.
We respect each others posts like how we would respect each other in real life. For the fact that you even had the though of changing the title from it’s original is completely wrong of you, and that you actually did so, you have failed to be my friend.
It is also hard to rewrite a title when there are comments in the body about the original title. Again, if you delete the body, you are once again an ignorant a-hole.
So thank you for telling everyone that you do not have a heart, and try to be a smart*ss, when really, you are just destroying the rules of tumblr.
PS Treat others the way you want to be treated
PSS Romney still sucks.

I think the overriding message here is respect.  And maybe grammar.  No really, the issue here is hypocrisy, with a heaping helping of self-righteousness.  Actually, a Tumblr user would be a self-righteousness machine, oiled with hypocrisy, manufacturing indignation and outrage for a marketplace of similar machines that continue to process and refine the product until it reaches maximum absurdity.

Me And My Blog

Posted by on February 27, 2015 No comments

I just finished reading a blog post about blogging.  The main content of the post seemed geared to doing blogging as a profession and as a way to make money.  It got me wondering when things changed?

No, I’m not really that dumb.  I know blogging, once it became mainstream, was a critical marketing and sales tool.  I guess at this point, my thoughts are, why is it still considered the way to do things?  And, like many cases where I read something that insists I need to do something differently to do it correctly, I question myself.

I made a milestone post a while ago describing my relationship with my blog.  It’s a personal journal, like me just talking to myself or to no one in specific.  And just right there, I violated another recommendation.  I didn’t link to the post where I mentioned that.  I do internal links extremely infrequently, which is considered bad.  I actually do very few links of any kind.  Why?  Because I think a link encourages distraction.  Someone has probably done some study of the pros and cons of hyperlinks vs. footnotes.  One providing instant additional information but possibly containing other information that hasn’t been covered yet, and the other allowing you to absorb the entire document before seeking additional info.

So let me explain my relationship with my blog, contrasted with other social media options.  This is a journal, first and foremost.  I can use it to search and remember what life was like for me at that time.  This blog does have some pretty low points in its records.  Although I could accomplish the same thing in Facebook, there’s a significant difference.  On FB, if I’m bitching, gloating, bragging, or whining, I’m doing it in front of my chosen audience.  Likewise, people are doing it to me when I am in their chosen audience.  But in my blog, even if the reader knows who I am, the blog is not directly attributable to my name. 

Here’s another way to put it.  Making a post on FB is saying, “I want everyone who is friends with me to know I said this.”  Making a post on my blog is saying, “I want anyone who cares to know this.”  See the difference?  The blog doesn’t directly attribute a statement to me.  It’s the same reason I don’t watermark any photographs.  I may not get credit for cool stuff, but I won’t get flack for bad stuff either.

How To Blog For Tumblr

Posted by on February 22, 2015 No comments

Two simple rules.  Make it all about yourself and make it emotionally exhausting.  For example:

Yesterday, I was out for a drive and I saw a business that I thought looked interesting.  I went inside and browsed around a little bit.  Some of the items they sold were kind of odd, and I just decided it wasn’t the kind of place for me.  So, when I was leaving, the owner asked me if I found everything ok.  I said that it was an interesting store and left it at that.  I didn’t say what I was really thinking.

Instead, you write:

Now, yesterday, I was outside for the first time in what felt like forever, since I’ve been cooped up in this asylum for what feels like forever.  As I drove along, my senses were exhilarated by the fresh, clean air – despite having that slightly opaque quality of horrible pesticide from the nearby farms.  And in those moments, I was caught between my love for life and the despise of my ego-centric human co-habitors who want nothing more than to make a shifty buck.  And speaking of bucks, here’s a new business that looks interesting.  Maybe I will find some of the things that make me go, hmmm.  That is my forte, you know.  Making people go hmmm.  Upon entering the store, I was completely taken aback by the unnerving and overpowering vibe of… weirdness?  Nay, insanity. My eyes wept for the innocence of a million children that would be subjected to such devious depictions of capitalism, and my mind, in its best attempt to shelter me from further despair, became numb to the entire experience.  When my overloaded, overworked, and overstressed senses could not handle the assault any further, I hastened to the door.  Oh sweet freedom from this agony!  You are only steps away!  But before I could savor the fresh, liberating experience of being unshackled from this oppression, the storeowner – a peddler of the most profane wares in the universe – had the audacity to ask me if I found what I was looking for.  In my mind, I cursed him a thousand ways and considered informing him that the only thing I found was offensive offerings with monetary and aesthetic value so low that I would need to be compensated to even consider purchasing one.  Choking back my words of justice, I politely told him his store was interesting and I left him to ponder the ramifications of such a simple answer to his question.  He should think long and hard on it, for there was a message in my tone of voice that words could not convey.  I pray that no one should have to be subjected to what I had to endure this day, yesterday.

You see, I can write like this, but choose not to.  Thank god.